Navy officials were “blindsided” on Thursday, a spokesman
told me, by President Donald Trump’s suggestion that he has convinced the Navy to
abandon a long-planned digital launching system in favor of steam on its newest
aircraft carrier.

In a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine,
Trump described his disgust with the catapult system known as Electro-Magnetic Aircraft
Launch System, nicknamed EMALS, aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. (Time
has published only
excerpts from the interview, not a full transcript.) The president described
wanting to scrap EMALS, a key technological upgrade at the center of the multibillion-dollar
carrier project, and return to steam.

I said, “You don’t use steam anymore for catapult?”
“No sir.” I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have
the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s
going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”

It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital.
What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure
it out. And I said—and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, “What
system are you going to be—” “Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said, “No you’re
not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars
more money and it’s no good.”

What is digital? To answer the president’s question
without getting into too many 0s and 1s, “digital” means using a computer to make
something happen. You know, the same sort of machine that connects us all to the
cyber. Are you still with me, or should we get Einstein over here? (I mean,
Einstein has
done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.) EMALS isn’t just
computer-based but uses a linear induction motor. That motor—which uses electric
currents to activate a magnetic core—propels a carriage down a track to launch an
aircraft, rather than using a steam piston drive to pull the aircraft.

It’s not that EMALS has been a smashing success.
Cost and schedule overruns have given the Navy carrier project a reputation for
being "one of the most spectacular acquisition debacles in recent memory,”
as Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, put
it in 2015. “And that is saying something.” The construction of three Ford-class
aircraft carriers has swelled from $27 billion to $36 billion in the last 10 years.

But the problems with the Ford-class carrier program
are more organizational than technological—a common theme among infrastructural
megaprojects. McCain blamed “misalignment of accountability and responsibility in
our defense acquisition system” and the vast bureaucracy of defense acquisition
systems, which span multiple offices and program managers.

Trump seems to have seized on the project’s bad reputation
without appreciating—or at least without clearly articulating—the complexities of
moving from steam to digital.

The steam-powered catapult systems that are being
replaced have been used to launch airplanes from U.S. carriers for some six decades
now. Not only are steam systems harder to maintain than electrical ones; they have
a lower upper-limit during combat—meaning electrical systems can launch more aircraft
in a shorter amount of time. Electrical systems can also better handle smaller aircrafts
and drones compared with steam. Steam systems also put
more stress on airframes, and make them more prone to corrosion. Not only that,
but carriers themselves are exceedingly
vulnerable to attack—meaning outfitting them with the modern defense systems
is a priority.

The goal for the upgraded system is to use carriers
to create “an operational honeycomb of interconnected forces with reach, range and
lethality against air, sea, space, and land-based targets,” as Robbin Laird and
Ed Timperlake wrote for the website Breaking
Defense in 2015.

Trump’s insistence on steam is perhaps bewildering,
but also consistent with some of his other views about technology. After all, the
president has repeatedly talked about returning to America’s golden age of manufacturing—an
idea that’s laughable, if regrettable, to anyone who has looked closely at the forces
driving the global economy. Among them: the rise of automation, which promises to
dramatically transform the way humans work across multiple industries, and which
Trump has all but ignored.

Then again, for a man who is clearly concerned with
hugeness, you’d think Trump might appreciate EMALS: In working order, the system
can launch anything from the sleekest drone to the sturdiest F-35, and it blasts
through the technological limits imposed by steam. Trump has demonstrated a fondness
for super carriers, and has said he plans to increase the U.S. fleet from 10 to
12.

He hasn’t, however, indicated how he plans to pay
for that. The cost of a single new, Ford-class carrier—about $11 billion without
cost overruns—would eat up nearly 20 percent of Trump’s proposed defense budget
increase, Reuters
reported in March.

The Navy says it is scrambling to figure out how
to address the president’s concerns. A spokesman said it will issue a statement
on Thursday afternoon, and figure out talking points for Naval leaders should the
question come up at public events.